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Freed U.S. detainees face uncertain future

WASHINGTON — Early on May 5, five Asian men who had been detained at Guantánamo Bay for years as dangerous terrorists, boarded a military transport plane at the U.S. naval base there.

The men had just exchanged their prison garb for jeans, T-shirts and slip- on sneakers, but were still in handcuffs as they boarded the plane, where they were shackled to bolts in the floor and surrounded by more than 20 armed soldiers. About 14 hours later, the plane landed in Albania, a poor Balkan nation eager to please Washington.

Interviews with lawyers and several officials in the United States and abroad showed that the flight, to a freedom of sorts for the five men, involved intense behind-the-scenes diplomatic activity:in Washington; Tirana, the capital of Albania; Beijing;and elsewhere.

It also held implications for a U.S. appeals court, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the relations of several European countries with China. And it underlined the Bush administration's difficulties in reducing the population of the Guantánamo Bay prison camp as international calls for it to be closed increased.

The five men were Uighurs who had been captured in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They had traveled there from their homeland in the Xinjiang Province of China, where the Uighur people, most of whom are Muslims, have fought a low-level insurgency against Beijing's rule for years.

For the group of five Uighurs, the transfer to Albania meant exchanging a military prison camp on the southeastern tip of Cuba for a bleak and unpromising future in one of the poorest European countries where no one speakstheir language. One of the men, Abu Bakker Qassim, said in an interview that, "I would rather be in a society where I can be with some of my countrymen, but where we are is better than Guantánamo."

For the Bush administration, one of the immediate results of the transfer was an opportunity to sidestep yet another court challenge to its detention policies.

Shortly after the five men landed in Tirana, the Albanian capital and largest city, and only minutes before the close of business in Washington on a Friday, the Justice Department filed a brief with a U.S. appeals court there. The brief asked the court to cancel a hearing on the next Monday on the Uighurs' challenge to their continued detention in Guantánamo Bay. They had been held there for more than a year after the U.S. military's special tribunal system had determined they were not "enemy combatants," the ostensible reason for their imprisonment.

A U.S. judge had ruled that the Uighurs' continued detention at Guantánamo was illegal and disgraceful, but he said he could not order them admitted to the United States, as their lawyers had requested.

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The appeals court was considering that issue. The Bush administration has opposed allowing Guantánamo detainees into the United States.

Upon learning the Uighurs were no longer at Guantánamo, the appeals court canceled the hearing.

A senior State Department official said in an interview that more than 100 countries had been approached about accepting the Uighurs but that only Albania did. Even though they were innocent, the official said, the five Uighurs could not be repatriated to China because Beijing regarded them as terrorists and the law prohibited sending prisoners to places where they might be persecuted.

The countries that had declined, including Washington's best European allies, did not want to antagonize China, officials and analysts said.

The State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the timing of their flight to Albania and the scheduled court argument was a coincidence. But a senior Justice Department official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said there had been an intense push to avoid a situation in which the appeals court could order the Uighurs admitted into the United States.

For Albania, the willingness to accept the Uighurs solidified that nation's standing with the United States and brought it a confrontation with China, which had been its patron during Albania's split from the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

On the weekend of the Uighurs' arrival in Tirana, the Chinese ambassador there protested to the Albanian prime minister, insisting they be returned to China. The ambassador repeated the demand Monday.

But the following day, May 7, Vice President Dick Cheney publicly endorsed Albania's much-hoped-for bid to join NATO.

Early this month, the Albanian government granted asylum to the Uighurs. The Albanian ambassador to Washington, Aleksander Sallabanda, said in a statement, "Our government is proud of its cooperation with the United States in the war on terror."